Wheeling and dealing goes to pot in Floydada

FLOYDADA - Ricky Gomez was driving down the highway between Ralls and Floydada early one morning close to Christmas when he noticed a tire in the middle of the road.

"I thought it was a blown-out tire, and I was going to get it off the road," he said. "But when I picked it up, I saw it was a tire and wheel and all. It was full of air and it hadn't been damaged. So I threw it in my car and took it home."

Gomez put the wheel on his front porch with a for sale sign.

When nobody was interested after about a week, he took it to a dealership and was happy to get $35 for his trouble.

Soon, the dealership sold the tire to a customer for $60.

But when the customer put the tire on his pickup earlier this month, something didn't feel right.

"They called us and said it was vibrating real bad and they thought it needed balancing or something," said Laura Farris, who works at Floydada's Ford-Mercury dealership. "We put it on the balancing machine and tried to balance it and couldn't. So our service manager told the technician to take the tire off the wheel and see if anything was in there."

Something was in there all right, and had been since before Gomez found it on the road - 10 pounds of bagged marijuana, worth about $10,000, according to Floydada police chief Darrell Gooch.

"I've been in law enforcement 17 years, and that's the first time anything like that has happened around here," Gooch said.

"We've found dope on the roadside before where people threw it out the window and things like that. But it's the first time we've had 10 pounds laying in the middle of the road."

It doesn't take a mechanic to figure out the tire was being used to transport the pot across Floyd County.

"My theory is somebody just put it under their vehicle and was going down the road when he lost it. He probably had no idea he lost it until he got to where he was going," Gooch said. "I'm sure he had a lot of explaining to do to whoever he was running for."

Gooch said Floyd County purchased its first drug-sniffing dog this year, in part, because of the sophistication with which dealers are transporting illegal narcotics.

"They're getting petty clever, coming up with good hidden compartments these days," he said. "Some of the better ones are false compartments in pickup-truck beds. They line the bottom with dope, lay a false bottom, weld it into place and paint it. Unless a dog gets after it, you can't hardly tell."

Apparently, it's not so easy to tell when drugs are hidden inside pickup-truck tires either - except the tires wobble when you try to drive on them.

David Stevens is a free-lance writer. He can be contacted at (806) 467-1312. His e-mail address is swnews@tcac.net.